RUSH: Hollywood, California, Ryan, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, how you doing, Rush?
RUSH: Fine. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: It’s amazing I’m talking to you. I’ve got big stories to tell all my friends now. I just had a comment on Miss America. Everyone I heard call in seems to want to punish her for having a few drinks and —
RUSH: There’s only been one caller.
CALLER: Two.
RUSH: No, no, no. There’s only been one caller. Nobody wants to punish her.
CALLER: Rush, the caller didn’t seem like we should just take it away because she went out and had a few drinks. She’s 20 years old, and it’s like no one… I just got a lot of it today from other people I guess, too. She’s 20 years old. It’s like nobody remembers what it’s like to be young and having fun, and if you’re going to drink underage, New York is the place to be because you’re not driving anyway. I just think we should —
RUSH: Now, I know what some of you people (laughing). She’s not driving anyway. New York is the place to be. (laughing) I know what some of you are thinking here, but he does have a point.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
This Miss USA thing is still dominating cable coverage. It’s either that or these poor guys that are lost out there on Mount Hood. That’s the extent of the “news.” I want you to compare that to what you hear on this program, ladies and gentlemen. When you watch cable news during the day, when the government is effectively shut down, you would think there’s no news. This “breaking news” with Miss USA, it’s still breaking news. This happened two and a half hours ago, and it’s still “breaking news,” what happened with Miss USA, or these poor guys out on Mount Hood. That’s been going on for weeks now, or days. Yet look at the substance that you get on this program. This is not a slow news day. There’s all kinds of stuff. How about: the Baghdad economy is starting to boom. This is in the Newsweek International edition.
Why, people that live in Iraq have even gotten Bush-style tax cuts, it says, and the Iraqi economy is booming, despite the war and despite all the chaos and so forth. How does one ‘splain this? Well, we’ll do our best in mere moments, but I want to go back to what this guy said about Tara Conner. He said, “Look, we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be 20.” When you’re 20, that’s what you can go out, have an all-night blowout with whatever number of bottles of booze you want, still get up and put in a full day of productive work the next day. By the time you hit 28, 29, 30, you can’t do that, certainly can’t do that when you’re forty or fifty, although we know people who try. He said (paraphrasing), “Twenty-year-olds make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes! None of us are perfect. Come on! She just had a few drinks. At least she was in New York where she wasn’t driving. If you’re going to do something like this…”
Now, who put out the allegation of cocaine? She has to have a drug test. Trump announced that, and so there are allegations that she’s out there using cocaine as well as swapping spit with Miss Teen USA, and a little romance going on there, while they’re consuming adult beverages. Now, at some point some people are going to say, “Wait a second! You can’t just sit there and say, ‘It’s a 20-year-old girl, and this is what 20-year-old girls do, and you gotta allow for this. We all remember what it was like to be 20.'” Well, in the old days — and they’re not that far back. In the old days — there was this thing called responsibility that went along with being singled out as one special woman in the country, in this case Miss USA. There are people who remember those days, and there are people think, “Just because of what might be an average of human behavior doesn’t give everybody a free pass from adhering to responsible behavior, especially when you’re Miss s USA or when you’re Miss America.”
I know those pageants are not highly thought of anymore. They don’t have quite the reputation and standing that they did. Believe me, this is going to help Trump try to revive the standing of the USA Pageant, or at least the popularity of it, if not the standing or the substance of it. Nevertheless, when people are willing to say, “Come on, she’s twenty! We all remember what it was like when was 20 years old,” it’s getting more and more difficult to have standards that you want to maintain and then apply them, because to apply standards means you must be judgmental, and judgmentalism is really frowned upon in this country right now! Nobody has the right to judge anybody. We are so focused on the imperfections of all of us; we are so focused on the fallibilities of all human beings — and, look, it’s happening in education. The high achievers?
“You’re outta luck. We’re not going to speed you up. We’re not going to plan our education system around you. In fact, we’re going to hold you back, because to promote you in the face of all these other mediocre students would make them feel horrible. We’re just not going to have this.” So there is an attempt that has been going on a long time for sameness, equality of outcome as well as equality of opportunity — and that’s what public education has largely become: equality of outcome. “It’s just not fair that some people are better than others.” It’s all rooted in class envy, but there is more openness and willingness here to excuse and forgive this kind of behavior than there used to be, and it’s because everybody is saying, “Well, I’ve done the same stuff. How can I come out and say (grumbling).” So nobody is willing to be judgmental anymore. You can think one way or the other about that being good or bad, but it is going to erode standards. It is going to erode institutions that have contributed to the greatness of the country, but these things are cyclical. At some point we’ll all get sick and tired of every award winner being a reprobate and demand the standards be applied again. Well, we will.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Keith in Terre Haute, Indiana. It’s nice to have you, sir.
CALLER: Oh, how you doing, Rush? It’s an honor.
RUSH: Good. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I just wanted to make a quick comment on this whole Miss USA thing. I pretty clearly remember being 20 years old, and I didn’t know any women that looked or acted the way this girl does, and if I had, then my ex-wife wouldn’t have had a chance. She probably would have saved me a whole lot of trouble!
RUSH: (Laughing.) Here’s the way to look at this, and I understand — in a way, in a human nature sense — people see something like this, and they feel guilty if they start demanding that standards be adhered to or if they start judging it all because everybody knows that they’ve done something like this to one degree or another. Most people would be mortified if the whole world knew about it. So there’s this lack of courage, if you will, to enforce standards, because nobody thinks that anybody can achieve them. The problem with this is — and I want you all to think about this. Now, I have spoken at great length on this program about my belief that high expectations are incredibly valuable and necessary in order for human beings to become the best they can be.
If you have great expectations of your kids — you’re not lauding it over them; I’m not talking about being celebrity parents or and so forth — or if the kids have teachers, or somebody around them that really respects them and has high expectations, the odds are that human beings will respond to those high expectations because they want to please people. If they’re not interested in pleasing themselves, they will want to please people, particularly the people they respect. The problem with laughing about this and sweeping it under the rug — which I understand, because most people think they’re fallible — is what’s happening to expectations? When did they become so low? Or when did the trend to lower expectations start, and what’s going to be the result of it? Now, in this case, you could say either seriously or cynically, “Come on, Rush! High expectations for a beauty queen? Give me a break.”
But in the old days… (Laughing.) I keep saying that! You know, I vowed when was a kid that when I got older I would never use the phrase “in the old days…” or “in the good old days…” I’d never be a parent that told my kids (I don’t have any, thank God) that I had to walk ten miles through the snow and so forth. We all heard that growing up. But I remember when the Miss America Pageant was a huge deal, and winning it was a huge deal, and it was an honor, and it required a certain kind of woman and comportment and behavior, and it did require some talent, not just bimbette status in the two-piece. Now, obviously things have changed. This is not, “Gee, if I had known then what I know how now…” I’m not wishing to turn back the clock.
But there are consequences to everything, and I think for parents who are raising kids with high expectations, who are trying to inculcate in them that there is virtue in trying to make as few mistakes as you make and that there is value in teaching them that there are consequences to actions that you take, as opposed to this. Most young people going to look at this and say, “She skated! Cool!” They’re going to think she got away with it, and they’re going to draw a lesson from it, and they may draw lessons from other examples like this in life. I’m just telling you that in terms of — forget the country for a second, because many people think that’s lost, but just in — your own family or in your city or your little town, your neighborhood or whatever, there are many people (and more than you would realize) who are still holding to notions that it is a good thing to prepare a young person to have high expectations and try to do the best they can most of the time, and to teach virtue and responsibility and this kind of thing.
They watch this kind of stuff, and they feel undercut and undermined. The same thing can happen when your kids come home from school and you’re not there and they turn on the Oprah show, and there’s that idiot Algore poisoning their minds on global warming with absolute lies and BS. It’s just as destructive as this crazy thing that’s going on here with Miss USA, perhaps even more so, if you want to know the truth, because there are probably more people that watch the Oprah show than are going to see this thing with Tara Conner even though it hijacked cable news for two hours today. The examples here of kids being assaulted with images and ideas that are, shall we say, not the least bit positive or productive is something that parents trying to raise kids responsibly are facing each and every day. (interruption)Yes, Mr. Snerdley? You’re frowning in there and you’re looking at me like I’ve gone off the deep end, and I, frankly, think that this has been a brilliant (as most of them are) ad-libbed monologue. He’s in there; he’s clearly thinking that I’ve lost it, that I’m off my rocker or something here today. You probably think I was out partying with her last night, right, and that’s why I’m not making sense today?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, some of you might be agreeing with Snerdley. Snerdley said, “This is just a bimbo in a swimsuit! This doesn’t mean anything about the country! I can’t believe what I’m hearing you saying! I mean, look at the garbage that is going on drug-wise and cultural-wise in the sixties when we were growing up, compared to now!”
I said, “You can’t look at it that way. Donald Trump thinks this is big. Trump thinks that he’s going to teach life lessons to all kinds of people with this episode,” and everything is cumulative. If this were just one incident, yeah, no big deal, but it’s the product and the by-product of other things. But I’m telling you, there are parents — because it’s all over television! It’s going to be all over Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, what have you.